Healthy orgs must have slack in the system and allow teams and individuals to do a little chasing of fun or meaningful things that give them intrinsic pride and motivation.
Teams must advocate for projects, but, for individuals, one solution that I've seen help is that the week long oncall developer handles sprint interruptions, slack questions, and bugs. No sprint commitments. If something is not on fire, they get to work on whatever they think will add value at their discretion. New tooling, proof of concepts, pet-peeve bugs that can't get prioritized, etc.
After lots of stabilization work, devs looked forward to oncall.
> Healthy orgs must have slack in the system and allow teams and individuals to do a little chasing of fun or meaningful things that give them intrinsic pride and motivation.
As an Engineering leader, I try my hardest to make sure this Slack exists for the exact reasons you listed.
Teams must advocate for projects, but, for individuals, one solution that I've seen help is that the week long oncall developer handles sprint interruptions, slack questions, and bugs. No sprint commitments. If something is not on fire, they get to work on whatever they think will add value at their discretion. New tooling, proof of concepts, pet-peeve bugs that can't get prioritized, etc.
After lots of stabilization work, devs looked forward to oncall.